


your scars on my skin

by aldonza



Category: 10th Kingdom (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Compliant, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Sharing Pain
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 00:05:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17032476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aldonza/pseuds/aldonza
Summary: "Prompt: soulmate au where soulmates share each other's pain."All she knows is that her soulmate's caused her more pain than he's worth, and she hates his stupid guts.





	your scars on my skin

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't thought about the 10th Kingdom in a long, long time. Had the chance to remember and rewatch recently, and it's every bit as charming as I remember. I have a different perspective on some things now, and I think it's for the better. And after all these years, I still have a soft spot for Virginia/Wolf, so here's a little soulmate au I put together!

The bruises and bumps fade in minutes, sometimes never showing up at all. The cracks and chips and cuts go away in hours. And once the tingling fires pass, her body mends as if nothing's ever happened. But, and the doctors tell her how rare it is, sometimes the injuries linger and a scar or two remains. Virginia's broken an arm and a leg, and she has three small scars etched in her skin.

Her father wishes he knew who to blame. Virginia does too, but some time by the second scar, she's stopped hating her soulmate, whoever he is.

Even before it really starts, Virginia's known she shares her body with someone else. There's no one in her, nobody who forces her to do this or that, but she knows there's a presence there, something that she can't live without, much like the blanket she loves so much. As a toddler, she's always wanted to walk, so when she crawls, she stands, and she falls. The bumps on her head are entirely her own. But the little pricks of pain she feels on her hands, on her knees, on her arms- those can't be hers. Scrapes appear left and right, as if scratched by wood, and as soon as they've come, they disappear.

At first, her parents panic over every little hurt. They plaster the house in bubble wrap and make her wear mittens in the hot city summer. There are boxes of bandaids with Virginia's favorite princesses smiling down- Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, and so on. She doesn't remember when her parents make the connection between her bruises and that  _someone else's_ , but she recalls her mother saying, "Tony, we should see a doctor."

Virginia remembers the doctor giving her a lollipop and telling Tony not to worry. "It's her soulmate. Probably a rough little guy. I wouldn't worry- I scraped my knees all the time when I was a boy. I'm sure you did too."

"Soulmate? But she's only three!" Christine replied.

"I know it's frustrating, but this isn't anything to worry about. Kid's older than your daughter, at least old enough to ride bikes and climb trees, that kind of stuff. They'll both grow out of it."

Virginia goes home with a prescription of bandaids and some painkillers (just in case). She hears Tony tell her mother later, over a glass of beer, that he's never felt her pain. Christine admits the same. But not everyone has to have this bond to know they're soulmates. It's a medical condition and their daughter happens to have it. It doesn't make their love for each other any less or her love for her mate any more.

But it doesn't get better. If possible, Virginia remembers it getting worse. She's four when she wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, feeling like she's been stabbed in the back many times over. Christine sobs along as she holds her and Tony keeps the thrashing at bay. The pain doesn't stop until a good few hours later. At the crack of dawn, Christine lifts her shirt- they take a photo for the doctor. There are burns on Virginia's back, high in degree and looking like a mess of charred skin, all the way from shoulder to waist. Her parents press ice to the wound as she whimpers, and by noon, the burns are gone.

But a small patch of wrinkled skin remains, right on the small of her back.

When she sees the doctor again, Virginia sniffles and whines as she remembers the pain. The hurt is gone, but she remembers so well. He pats her head, and in his most grown-up voice says, "I'm so sorry, Virginia. This just means that your soulmate's hurting very badly. But see? It leaves a little scar because now he's okay. You're going to be okay."

But he's more worried when he talks to Tony and Christine. Maybe Virginia's soulmate was just a victim of an unfortunate accident that they'll laugh at in the future. Or maybe he's not. Maybe she's not. So Virginia's parents spend the next few weeks researching the news, all over the country and the world, for fires. It's a lot to take in. And of course, there are fires, but none of the victims (the ones that lived anyway) are little boys or girls. They'd wanted to find this child and berate its parents, or perhaps take it away from wherever it was altogether, and raise both children in peace.

Virginia's parents fail. Her grandmother says her soulmate must be a good-for-nothing like Tony if he's this accident prone. But nothing like the so-called fire happens again. Even so, Virginia decides she never wants to meet her soulmate. She doesn't want to think about this child whose non-existent face reminds her of nothing but horrible pain.

She starts hating her soulmate when she turns six. Whoever he is, he's ruined her birthday. There's a full moon out and the family was supposed to spend the night on the beach. But Virginia gets so sick that she can't do anything but cry into her mother's. And the fever lasts until the sun comes up.

Tony thinks that the other child's come down with a bad flu. "Maybe bad sushi," he jokes.

But it happens again, and again, and again, until the fevers become not so bad because Virginia's used to it. She doesn't cry. She takes her medicine and it goes away, and even the doctor can't quite explain this pattern. He can only assume that wherever this boy (or maybe girl) is, flu seasons are sporadic. Christine wonders if it has anything to do with the weather- Virginia remembers these fevers striking under full moons. But it remains a mystery for Virginia until many years later.

All she knows is that her soulmate's caused her more pain than he's worth, and she hates his stupid guts.

The only good thing to come about from all this is that her parents don't fight. They don't yell or cry at each other when their attention's all on her. And for a while, even though she's afraid of whatever rotten thing her soulmate will do to her next, Virginia's okay with basking in her parents' love. But then they get to used her fevers and there are no more burns. And they start burning each other again.

When Virginia turns seven, Christine gives her a bath. Her mother looks at her like she's the only thing in the world, the most precious and most rotten thing all at once. Then she holds her shoulders and pushes Virginia down, until her breaths are lost underwater and her hair floats up.

"You're a mistake!" Christine hisses, not quite herself and weeping as her daughter gasps.

In the end, Tony yanks her away and Christine runs out. They never see her again. For the next few years, Virginia wakes up screaming in her father's arms. And this time, it has nothing to do with her soulmate. Because there are worse things than pain caused by strangers- pain caused by people you love.

By the time she's ten, Virginia's grown used to little scratches appearing on her arm. They close up instantly, but not soon enough for her to avoid the pain. The scratches started when she was eight and to be honest, she doesn't really mind. She watches the cuts break open and bleed, imprints of claw marks and scabbing skin, and keeps them to herself. They fill her with a sort of morbid fascination and in some wrong way, they make her feel better. It's distracting and strange and wrong, she knows, but they don't scar and they tell her, if nothing else, that her soulmate feels the same.

Then she breaks her arm when she's twelve, or rather, her soulmate does. She's in school when it happens, in the middle of eating her peanut butter sandwich. Her food falls with a splat and her arm snaps with a crunch. Tony leaves work without telling his boss that day. When Virginia's rushed to the hospital, trying not to sob and let the ugly snot run, they find out it's a compound fracture. The staff tells them the cause is blunt trauma, and because there's a pattern to the breaks, it's not an accident. Virginia hears Tony say "fuck" in front of her for the first time when an nurse asks him, quite harshly, if he has anything to do with it.

They have the soulmate talk all over again, but quicker and heavier now that she's older. Even though it's her soulmate that's broken the arm, Virginia still has to have surgery for it, still has to lie in bed with a cast as she waits for the pain to pass. She thinks about the scratches and the burns and all that rumbling and tumbling. Maybe her soulmate's in some kind of gang, like those rakish boys at her school. Maybe he's always angry and fighting and yelling. That's why he's so rough and careless and- she starts crying, wondering why he couldn't stop a moment to think about everyone else.

Eventually, her arm heals and the scratches start fading into nothing at all. Only the fevers remain, and the pattern never errs. Virginia stops thinking about her soulmate, now that his presence is less pronounced- maybe he's gotten less clumsy because she rarely feels his bumps and bruises, and maybe he's gotten less angry because there are no more broken bones. Maybe this soulmate mellowed into a safer, saner person, and all Virginia has to do is focus on her studies and her little odd jobs and living with her dad until they meet and marry and live the rest of their lives in quiet little peace.

Her leg breaks before she turns fifteen. She'd been in the elevator and screaming when it opened. Tony and a neighbor, who moved away one year later, take her to the hospital. It's not quite as bad as the arm, but the fractures are still all over the place and the bones are pretty fucked. There are black and blue bruises dotting her ribs, and places on her torso that look the marks of a shoe. The bruises fade in the next couple days, but she's walking in crutches for the better part of the semester. It's not like she wanted to be a cheerleader anyway.

At Homecoming, she leaves the boy she's kissing to go get punch. But what she really does is slip out of the gym and shiver in the evening air. She doesn't remember the boy's name- just that she's with him because she thought she had to be. It's not what she wants. And she whispers, wishing to nothing in particular, "Why wasn't it you?"

She doesn't know who's 'you.' Why hadn't her mother come back? Why couldn't she make her father happy? Why wasn't she anything more than this broken mess? Why was her soulmate doing everything but helping? She doesn't know.

She's seventeen when Tony finds her bleeding out in bed. This time, the ambulance comes to them. There's a puncture beneath her ribs, as if broken by a knife, rope burns around her wrists, splashes of purple all over her aching form, blood gushing under her skin, and one look in the paramedic's glasses tells her she has a crooked nose and an eye so swollen it almost burst. The injuries on her face go away by the end of the day and the rope burns fade along. The bruises go next. But the stab wound stays, and so do the other hemorrhages she'd been lucky enough to gain.

So Virginia doesn't go to prom because she's cooped up in the I.C.U. Which is a bit of a relief because she never really liked her date and wasn't quite so ready to let him have his way with her. She spends her time at the hospital watching cooking shows on T.V, vaguely thinking to herself, "I'd like to that too" when the contestants talk about their restaurants across the nation. She thinks up a menu in her spare time and jots down recipes on pieces of notepaper. When Tony's off work, he passes the time by her side, trying to act like nothing's wrong.

"I'll kill him," Tony tells her, "whoever this guy is, he's dead."

"Dad, that'd kill me too. Literally."

That's not quite true. She knows that if a soulmate dies, the other can live on. And from what she's heard, the living party doesn't even feel pain, just a weird sad dread that tells them their other half is gone. Which, in her opinion, sounds infinitely worse. Then, looking out the window and at the lights of New York, Virginia thinks about her soulmate again. She doesn't want this thought, but somewhere deep down, she's always wondered- maybe he isn't an angry young man, maybe he's not clumsy or violent or suicidal. Maybe all this time, someone's been hurting her soulmate, digging blades in his skin, crushing his bones, burning his back.

Her hands clench. This was the love of her life, the person she was supposed to love with the whole of her heart. And someone out there was trying to break him apart bit by bit. Virginia decides that she's not going to let anything kill her or her soulmate. She's going to live out of pure spite- for her mother who left her, for all the teachers and students who looked at her like a speck of dirt, for every bad boss she's ever had- and she's going to meet the man of her dreams, and she's never going to let anything harm him again.

When she leaves the hospital, there's a scar under her ribs, a thin sliver of white against her skin.

Virginia gets her third scar when she's twenty. She's serving cocktails in a skimpy uniform that she dearly hates when the glass slips from her hand. The pain comes at her like a bullet. She passes out and when she wakes up, she finds out she's fired and that her medical bills have gone up again. There's a bandage over her shoulder, and according to Tony, who's sitting at her bedside again, it's covering a nasty infected wound. When the nurse changes her dressings, Virginia winces- it looks like a bite mark, the imprints of canine teeth, left raw and red against her skin. Her shoulder had almost been torn off, or rather, her soulmate's shoulder.

Thankfully, the wound fades within a month, until nothing's left but a jagged scar almost small enough to be a birthmark. Virginia cares for it even after it's healed- she takes her antibiotics accordingly and spends a minute each night applying neosporin. It's silly, she knows, but if she can somehow help her soulmate heal with a little medicine and cream, then nothing's silly at all.

Virginia never finishes college and doesn't plan to go back. She's pretty good at working though, much better at keeping a job than a guy, and she begins saving for her restaurant, which is a grand total of twenty bucks, since everything else goes into helping Tony pay their rent and debts. Sometimes she still feels bumps on her head, sees scratches on her arm, feels blood on her lip, winces from heat on her legs, and on more than one occasion, wakes up with bleeding lashes on her back or a crack in each rib. The fevers still come and her soulmate loves scraping her hands. But she's grown used to these intervals of pain, and they always fade within the hour, no scars left.

It still annoys her, angers her, that her soulmate's hurting, but the injuries tell her he's alive, that he's out there, heart beating, chest heaving, and that's enough. She doesn't think about her soulmate as flesh-and-blood often; she knows he's real, but she's never bothered putting a face to him. She used to think of a greaser with bandaged knuckles and a mouth smelling of tobacco, a boy fifteen who acts eighteen. Then she thinks of a softspoken ginger with big, round glasses, who's always tripping over untied shoes and breaking his nose. And then, this one she hates but always comes back to, a wounded little boy hiding in the dark, his knees always bruised, blood on his clothes, and nobody ever coming to save him from the storm ahead.

And then, Virginia meets Wolf.

She's twenty-five, almost six, looking twenty-two, when she hits a dog with her bike. Her soulmate must have felt that. What she expects is the dog's owner to come forward, either thank her or yell at her, and leave. She does not expect to be hunted by a group of trolls who like the offspring of MTV and Tolkein's orcs. She does not expect the dog to write,  _write_  at her, she does not expect him to be a prince, does not expect fairy tales to be real, does not expect her father to make a series of cursed wishes, does not expect to follow said prince through an interdimensional mirror. It's all too much to question and her head never stops spinning.

But before all that, she does not expect the man- who'd she'd seen try to cook her grandmother, with her own two eyes no less- to declare his undying love and lust for her  _on sight_. His jacket's too big and his eyes are too bright and his hair's too black, too mussed, and he's too much. Just  _too much_. And it only gets worse, as she soon finds out. But the worst part is-

"Get away from me!"

When she smashes the vase over his grinning head, she feels it smash over her skull too. And she runs away, gasping so he doesn't see the dizziness in her eyes. Nothing's knocked her in the crown, and she prays it's a side effect of her crash with the dog, because if not, if not- then that means-

Virginia denies that her soulmate is a wolf, or half-wolf as he claimed, for as long as she can. She ignores his cries of passion and that look halfway between adoring puppy and drooling villain, and the worst part is, she knows he's sincere. Somehow, that makes his decrees of love all the worse. She doesn't tell him about the vase, and when he falls ill, she hides her fever, but she knows now that it's the full moon. And sitting by him in a barn, soothing his burning brow, she knows- without a doubt, her soulmate is him, had always been him.

She thinks about all she's suffered because of him, all the wounds that marked her body and his, and she wonders, shuddering, if he'd deserved it after all. He's wild, unkempt- half human, but  _only_  half human- and what he's done before, she doesn't know. Maybe he was every bit as cruel and wicked as the wolves of lore, and she'd just been unlucky enough to be stuck with him. But 'why me'? is a question she's asked all her life and she wants to stop. And still-

When the people of Little Lamb Village pull him away, when she feels the ropes against her (his) skin and the fire licking her feet, she almost cries. Or maybe she did cry with him. She knows it's stupid, that all she really has is her own belief that he didn't kill that girl (and it's not like he hasn't tried to eat anyone in front of her before), but in the few seconds that she thought (for sure) before he would die, she knows it wasn't him. She just knows, in her heart, in her blood. And then nothing else matters because she doesn't care about the pain to come. And if she's even more honest, she doesn't care if it  _was_  him.

Because she-

Wolf doesn't die that day and nobody's flesh is burned. And before Virginia can even process what it was that she thought, Kissingtown happens. She hates that town. Its magic makes her forget and makes her want. For a moment, it tells her she wants him (because she really does), but for what? And then the magic breaks apart. Everything comes crashing down and her ticket home is gone. In the end, Wolf's not like the villains in her stories. He's much, much worse. Because the big, bad wolf doesn't think he loves you. He doesn't act like you're the world and then steal it from under your feet. He doesn't blow away your chance to go home for food you won't even eat. And he doesn't make you think you love him.

Because she did love him.

Maybe she loved him when he told her about the badgers in the forest, or the night he sat with her by the firelight. Maybe she'd been taken by his odd charm, the mask of the man he wore. And he's unlike any guy she's ever had. Any breakup hurts, but whatever it was she had with Wolf, it hurts more than anything else.

And that's why it feels so good when he comes back, when she sees the apology in his eyes, when they hold each other and she says, "I think I love you."

A delight sparks through her when those words come out, an unspoken euphoria that she knows must have come from him. And then she admits that with him, she's happy. As they roll over one another in the grass, she thinks back to when she was seventeen, when she told herself that she'd meet the love of her life and live happily ever after with him. Her clothes fly off and Virginia takes Wolf's hand. She puts his fingers over the scar on her shoulder, the one beneath her ribs, the one on the small of her back. She guides his head as he kisses each one, puts her hands under his shirt and roams.

She feels the same mark on his shoulder, stretching from collarbone down, the little scars along his ribs and the bumpy piece of skin right under. She presses herself against him, nails digging into the roughness on his back. His tail brushes her thigh, and their bodies melt together. And Virginia admits, there was never magic in Kissingtown- she's wanted him, simple as that.

When their escapade ends, Virginia wiggles back into her clothes and Wolf lazily sits into his pants. He's kept the shirt on, having never taken it off.

"You saw my scars," Virginia tells him, waiting for his excited response.

"And they're beautiful, just like the rest of your creamy, dreamy self."

"Hm, what if I wasn't so dreamy? What if I had no head- what would you do?"

He nuzzles her neck. "Then I'd make sweet wolfie love to my darling headless Virginia. Huff puff, you'll always be dreamy to me."

Virginia doesn't tease him about the practicality of mating with a headless person. Instead, she touches the scar on her shoulder. "You have one just like this." She expects to hear the grin in his voice, to hear sweeping romantic gestures about how they're meant to be.

Instead, he frowns, brow creasing, and quietly, asks, "Do you still want me, Virginia?"

She touches his face, confused. "What? Of course I do. I just meant, that, well- we have the same scars. What do you think that means?"

He scratches his temple, which completely ruins the moment's sensuality. Virginia stops his hand.

"It means we're soulmates," she says.

His mouth shapes a surprised "Oh" and it dawns on her like a slap to the face- he doesn't know. Nobody knows. No one in Kissingtown had even advertised it. And if he had known, of course Wolf wouldn't have stayed silent about it. Then the ridiculousness of what she's about to say really sets in. Suddenly, she feels like she's the one from a fairytale book.

"Back home," she says, "in the tenth kingdom, um, we have this thing. Not everyone goes through it, but some people- like me- do. When you're soulmates with someone, you can feel their pain. So say, if I cut my finger, you'd feel that. And I guess it depends on what happens, but sometimes your scars stay with your soulmate too. It's a little hard to get used to, but it helps you know if you have someone you're really, really meant to be with."

And probably thinking back to all  _those_  moments from her (his?) past, Wolf gives a horrified whimper, bordering on howl. "Oh cripes! I'm so sorry! I'd never hurt you, Virginia, never ever, not in a million-"

She shushes him with a kiss. "I don't want to talk about that now. Just- just know you're mine."  _And I'm yours._

Now the sweeping romantic gestures come.

And just when the pieces of Virginia's life come together, they fall apart again. She's accepted the nine kingdoms, accepted that her mother is the evil queen, accepted that Wolf is her soulmate- and it's still not enough. She doesn't quite have time to register Wolf's betrayal the second time around, and just as she's wrapped her head around it, it turns out he's never betrayed her anyway. Christine takes front and center in Virginia's life, all those years coming to a head, and then the queen dies by her hand. Her mother is dead.

Virginia wakes a hero, but all she feels is a dull ache. Wolf sits by her side, muttering sweet somethings and trying to warm her with his nearness. There's something tired in his eyes, a touch of pain that Virginia's sure has come from herself- then, at least, she knows he understands her grief. She squeezes his hand and the morning passes.

Later, Tony tells her he felt nothing. Christine is dead. And Tony feels nothing, no pain at all save a feeling of what-could-have-been. If nothing else, it's proof that they were never meant to be. He doesn't cry because he's cried enough. But as Virginia breaks down in her father's arms, he says, "And you know what, it's bullshit. Because we had you. And that's enough to tell me it's meant to be."

"I love you," she tells him.

And she says "I love you" to Wolf in the evening, and this time, it means something very different. And finally, finally, she puts the past behind. If Wolf's to be believed, there's a cub inside her, and it's not as upsetting as she thought it'd be. It's not like they have condoms in the nine kingdoms. And Virginia knows she can handle it, knows that she has her father and her husband and her (step) brother right behind her. It's as happy as a happily ever after can be for her.

Then, on a lazy Sunday morning back in Manhattan, Wolf tells her everything.

**Author's Note:**

> To anyone still reading for this fandom, hope you enjoyed that and do drop a comment/kudos so I know you're out there! Thank you for reading and let me know if you're interested in the next part!


End file.
